Until the disappointingly conventional ending, in which dad and the head baddie go it mano a mano on the streets, this dark drama -- based on a 1956 Glenn Ford picture of the same name -- negotiates its narrative twists and turns with professional aplomb, even daring to make the hero an arrogant schmuck.

Writer-director Christopher Hampton's adaptation of Joseph Conrad's widely-read novel is an honorable failure, a screen version that's actually too faithful to its source.

The characters are two-dimensional types -- the good girl, the tough lesbian, the saintly mother -- but the cast gives its all. Just try not to get too distracted by the echoes of other movies, like DEAD END BOYZ N THE HOOD.

As the doomed lovers, DiCaprio and Danes -- both luminous, limpid-eyed beauties -- are allowed to deliver delicate, unpretentious performances, and their love becomes a modest, frighteningly fragile oasis amidst a tawdry saturnalia of noise and glitter.

Louise Fletcher is a walking sight gag as the evil principal, but just about every other gag falls flat and lies there, wheezing.

Gast doesn't hide his admiration for the charismatic Ali, whose antics provide the film's most enjoyable moments.

Halloween makes fright fans even more tolerant than usual of second-rate horror pictures, and this one still doesn't cut the mustard.

The genial humor is occasionally marred by an overall sexist tone and some downright nasty homophobic and racist attempts at humor.

The dullest movie ever made about child abuse, conspiracy and murder.

[Jude] is bristling, muscular Victorian noir. Of the scant handful of previous Hardy adaptations, none can match its intensity.

It all has an artless, ephemeral feel, and 20 years from now people will marvel at the fashions, the landscapes and the attitudes it captures like fragile bugs in amber.

The usual John Grisham legal hokum, tranformed by director James Foley into surprisingly grim and affecting stuff.

And while the film is unflinching in its depiction of the brutality of both the English and the Irish, Jordan pointedly dissociates his hero from any actual ugliness.

This is the kind of movie in which a dozen bad guys with an automatic weapon in each hand couldn't hit a lake if they were standing at the bottom of it, to steal the screenplay's best wiseacre remark.

Where Cassavetes often uncovered the grotesquerie underlying such desperate lives -- usually after one round too many -- Buscemi's vison is rooted in compassion and a quirky humor that's entirely his own.

A silly period production, built around the sorry spectacle of two smug American stars lording it over the natives... Based on true events, the film is nevertheless absolutely preposterous, and informed by stereotypes that don't play well in the 1990s.

The spectacle is absolutely enthralling, and even a bit frightening.

The result is flashy -- first-time directors Larry and Andy Wachowski never miss an opportunity to show us red, red drops of blood against brilliant white -- but pretty good fun, especially if the thought of Tilly in a succession of thigh-high bandage dresses makes you sweat.

It's so bright (even when it means to be serious) and bubbly that it seems mean to point out that it isn't really about anything -- except how cool sharkskin suits and Capri pants are.

The comedy is cruelly subliterate (powdered deer privates figure prominently), the action -- performed by an aging, dumpy Seagal -- pointless, and the story pieced together from moldy cliches.

A radiant, heartbreaking film.

It's not that this is a bad, blackly comic slice-of-lowlife: It's just that you've just seen it all before.

Hackman's role requires him to spend so little time on screen that it's virtually an above-the-title cameo, and Grant trots out his trademark charming mannerisms, which look a bit fresher than usual by virtue of the darker than usual context. Be warned: Director Michael Apted does not resist the temptation to preach.

The script is shapeless and it all goes on far too long.

Yes, it's great that Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton and Bette Midler -- all women of a certain age, though they've done their best to make sure no one's certain what it is -- get to carry a major motion picture, playing college chums reunited by the perfidy of men.

This movie is a dreary endurance test.

An apparently unintentional parody of the he-man school of filmmaking, in which gunfire replaces dialogue and escalating violence passes for story development.

A meandering mess of violence and aging stars who've seen much better days, all buoyed up by an in-your-face soundtrack that never lets up.